Recruitment
by shiiki
Summary: Thalia gets a tempting offer. Luke fears she'll take it. Annabeth wonders if they'd want her, too. Pre-canon scene written for strawberrygirl2000. Hints of Thalia/Luke.


**A/N** : For **strawberrygirl2000** —when you mentioned today was your birthday so you were excited that chapter 2 of TIM would be coming out the day after, I thought, _hang on, surely I can go one better!_ I've been stalled on writing one-shots all summer, but this was exactly the motivation I needed to write one up. You've been the most amazing cheerleader a writer could hope for and I am so grateful for the support and encouragement you've given to the DoW series over the last two years! Happy birthday, my dear, and I hope you enjoy this fic. It's based on your prompt on the forum (in case you've forgotten since it's been a million years, it was this: _It would be so cool to see a story about the hunters coming to recruit Thalia the first time. Either from Annabeth's POV, overhearing it all, or Thalia's contemplating it…_ Well, how about both, with a bonus thrown in?)

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 **Recruitment**

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 _i. Annabeth_

Annabeth can't tear her eyes away from the silver girls.

The way they emerge from the trees with a shower of sleek arrows that find their way unerringly to the heart of the seven-clawed badger. (The beast that pursued her, Thalia, and Luke across two highway truck stops falls and disintegrates into what Luke calls Tartarus dust.)

The way moon-white wolves lope easily at their ankles, like her Dobermann used to bounce along next to hers. (She'll never admit it, but she cried for days when Daisy died.)

The way they hold themselves, so confident and unafraid of anything. (She bets they aren't even afraid of spiders.)

Hunters, they call themselves. Hunters of Artemis.

Annabeth thinks of the compendium of Greek myths in her bookcase at home ( _in Richmond,_ she corrects; it's no longer _home_ ). It's the only full book she's ever managed to struggle through. Artemis was the entry right after Athena.

Moon goddess. Leader of the Hunt. Artemis is supposed to have a chariot pulled by golden deer. Annabeth would have liked to see that, but the only gold thing around is the hilt of the bronze sword Luke lifted from the ashes of the monster. Why a mutant badger had a sword strapped to its back is beyond Annabeth.

He's stabbing the point of it into the ground now as he stares at the closed flap of the tent that Thalia disappeared into, along with the girl who looked like an exotic princess. Zoë. Even her name sounds like something out of a fairy tale. Luke wasn't happy when Thalia agreed to speak to Zoë alone. Annabeth isn't entirely sure why.

It might have something to do with the colourful brochure that he ripped up almost immediately after Thalia and Zoë walked away. A piece of it is lying near Annabeth's feet. She reaches for it. There's half a picture and a line of black text underneath it. Annabeth uses her finger to draw out pictures for each of the letters, the way Luke taught her. It works so much better to puzzle out the words, better than that stupid thing her first-grade teacher called _phonetics._

 _Are you the recruit we're looking for?_

'What's recruit mean?'

The wolves meandering around the tent look at her balefully. Luke is silent for long enough that she thinks he's not going to answer her. Finally, he tears his eyes away from the tent.

'It means they want Thalia.'

She turns this idea over in her head, trying to imagine Thalia dressed in a silver tunic instead of her black jacket and cargo pants. It won't stick.

Then she imagines herself wearing those silvery clothes. 'Would they want me, too?'

Luke frowns. 'I think you're a bit young.' But the idea seems to trouble him. He yanks his new sword out of the ground and runs his finger along the blade.

It scares her, this Luke. His dark, dangerous expression turns him almost into a stranger. She wraps her arms around herself. What will happen if Thalia leaves, and it becomes just her and Luke?

Without Thalia, they'd be left with a family of two, and that's not enough. She should know. It used to be just Annabeth and her dad, and she wasn't enough to make a family so he went and got himself a new, better one.

Thalia won't do the same … right?

 _ii. Luke_

Luke hands the sword to the leader of the group, a coppery-skinned girl with a tiara woven into her long, black braid. She looks no older than him, but her eyes rake dismissively over him like she's seen way more than he ever will.

'Keep it,' she says. 'We have our own weapons.' Her haughty tone of voice makes it clear that she believes their weapons are far superior.

Bright spots appear on Luke's cheeks. 'We're good fighters, too.'

Thalia puts a hand on his arm. 'Thanks for your help,' she says to tiara-girl. 'That was some nice shooting.'

'I could've taken it,' Luke mutters.

Tiara-girl sniffs. 'You're a boy.'

'What's that supposed to mean?'

Tiara-girl doesn't bother to address him. She turns to Thalia. Her eyes are a bit more approving now. 'I am Zoë Nightshade,' she says. 'We should speak more privately.'

Thalia's eyes dart to Luke. 'What do you mean?'

'We Hunters do not deal with _boys,_ ' Zoë says firmly.

'Look here, you—'

'Luke.' Thalia gives him that _look,_ the one that always ends with him going along with whatever she suggests—be it following a strange goat or using his detested lock-picking talents. Thalia _always_ gets her way. 'Stay with Annabeth. I'll just see what they want.'

He can tell her what they want. Even if he hadn't heard the myths about Artemis's band of eternal maidens before, it's obvious from Zoë's smug demeanour and the triumphant glance she throws Luke as she ushers Thalia into the silver tent—like she _owns_ Thalia already—that she's confident she can steal her away from Luke.

'You're only holding her back, you know,' says another Hunter, handing him a folded brochure. It looks like some sort of girl scout advertisement. Black text screams up at him: _Are you the recruit we're looking for?_ Luke glowers at the silvery maidens until they shrug and back away, retreating to Zoë's tent. His fingers tremble so violently that they rip the top edge of the brochure, and then he finishes the job, relishing the short-lived satisfaction of tearing the offensive recruitment flyer into shreds.

Annabeth sidles up to him. She's picked up the pieces of the brochure and shuffles them in her hands as she asks, 'What's recruit mean?'

He tries to answer, but his voice doesn't sound like his own, and when Annabeth asks if the Hunters might want her, too, an ice shard stabs into his heart.

'I think you're a bit young,' he says. Thalia, on the other hand, is _exactly_ the type of talent they're looking for.

If they take Thalia, he'll still have Annabeth. But a seven-year-old girl, even one who stares at him like he's a god, is no compensation for losing the best friend he's ever had in his life.

'Is Thalia going to leave?'

His hands are shaking again. 'I don't know,' he says, when what he means is if they take her, he'll chase them down until he gets her back.

He promised he'd follow Thalia anywhere, and he meant it.

He is never so relieved as when she storms out of Zoë's tent, her expression as black as the night sky.

 _iii. Thalia_

How dare she? That smug, know-it-all snob with her high-flown words and condescending attitude.

How dare she throw down her offer so presumptuously, like it was a done deal? Like Thalia should be _grateful_ to accept a place with them? How dare she act like they'd be saving Thalia from her miserable life? As if Luke's company is something she needs to be _rescued_ from.

Luke's the best friend she's ever had, and even if he weren't, Thalia's never needed to be rescued from anything. She can take care of herself—and Luke, _and_ Annabeth—thank you very much.

 _He'll let you down. Boys always do._

 _Not Luke,_ she said. _Not Luke,_ she thinks now.

He's sitting with Annabeth at the moment, carefully changing the dressings on her wounded leg. Luke speaks quietly to the younger girl, taking her mind off the pain with a story about Jason and the Argonauts. He tugs fondly on her blonde braid, making Annabeth laugh, and for a moment, Thalia sees herself flipping patiently through a picture book with one hand while checking the Band-Aid on the upper lip of a golden-haired two-year-old with the other.

(She allows herself one brief thought before firmly locking it away in the mental chest of drawers she refuses to open: _If he'd lived, he'd be about Annabeth's age now._ )

No, Luke isn't the jerk Zoë insists all boys are, or the traitor that old man, Hal Green, prophesied him to be. Luke is like her. He's the same. They're the same. How they learned to care for others when they never got it from their parents, she can't say. But they have, and they will take care of Annabeth. She's their chance to make things right for everyone else they failed.

And together, they're a family. She thinks of the one she left in California, the one family she was forced to lose, and her resolve tightens like a band around her chest.

Zoë Nightshade doesn't know the first thing about Thalia, daughter of Zeus, if she thinks Thalia would abandon her only friend to life on the run and the care of a lost seven-year-old who needs them.

Even so, the last image to cross her traitorous brain before she falls asleep that night is a picture of the Hunters packing up to leave, melting into the woods with silent footfalls and invisible prints that echo through her head. What must it be like to be the hunter and not the hunted?

And she can't help the thought that strays across her head: if she didn't have Luke, it wouldn't have been a bad offer, not really.

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 **A/N** : And because I always have little research notes—Annabeth's drawing-pictures-for-letters is an idea from some online advice on teaching dyslexic children to read. I'm afraid I can't verify it, but maybe someone can correct me if I got it wrong!


End file.
